


Broken Shingles

by orphan_account



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Alcohol, Blood, Canon-typical swearing, Character Study, Death, Gen, Siblings, Smoking, Swearing, eating problems
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-08
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2019-01-10 13:29:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12300114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: There's something rottenly beautiful in the way that somehow, even after you die, the world can keep spinning without you.(Or- Morty Smith is fourteen when he sees his first dead body.)





	Broken Shingles

i.

“Hey,” she said, leaning out her bedroom window, hands gripped up against the side of the windowsill. Her knuckles were rubbed raw; she’d been using her punching bag again. 

After a while, he felt his eyes slide from his sister back to the dimly-lit horizon. “Hey,” he said back.

She began to pull herself out onto the side of the house, grabbing the gutters and swinging her leg up out of the frame. The gutter groaned beneath her weight as she used it as leverage to haul herself up onto the roof, but both of them knew from experience that it would hold.

“Full moon,” Summer said after a minute, breath wavering from exertion as she scooted to sit by her brother. The shingles scraped against the knees in her jeans, and Morty thought that in another time, he might have reminded her how mad mom got when she got holes in her pants. 

That thought made him sad, so he stopped thinking about it.

“It looks like a big boob,” he said instead, and yeah, that isn’t much better, but the way his sister’s face scrunched up as she laughed makes it okay. She snorts when she laughs, like their mother when she’s had a little too much to drink and their dad makes a mediocre joke. 

They sat in silence for a moment. The hazy night was heavy with the remnants of the heavy rain that had ended only a half an hour ago, and the chill in the air was like little needlepoints on his elbows. It’s was good kind of hurt, the kind that makes you unable to distance yourself from the moment. The pain reminds you,  _ this is real. You are real.  _ Sometimes, that’s all Morty needed. That was all anyone needed.

Maybe he was looking too far into it.

Summer looked at him. He saw the glance from the corner of his eye. It was a look that made his skin itch anxiously, angrily. 

“Mom said you didn’t eat dinner again."

“Y-” The words caught in his throat. “Yeah?”

She nodded. It wasn’t an accusatory gesture, but the nervous bugs under his skin began to scuttle around anyways. 

He was barefoot. The soles of his feet were rough against the rooftop’s edge.  _ I could push myself off right now,  _ he thought to himself. Then,  _ That’s fucking emo. _

“You need to eat. You could, like. Die or whatever.”

The concern was thinly veiled. 

“Smoking k-kills, Summer.”

The reaction was immediate. From the corner of his eye, he saw her straighten her back, face twisting, mouth opening and shutting uselessly.  _ She’ll catch flies,  _ Morty thought humorlessly. 

He’d seen the packs tucked away in her bag, into the sides of her mattress. He’d pretended not to notice when he’d leaned out the window for a breath of fresh air and gotten a mouthful of ash and smoke. The crumpled up Camels in the trashcan stuffed under cracker boxes and empty alcohol bottles hadn’t gone unnoticed.

Summer was looking at him, fists curling and uncurling, brows furrowed. She looked like she was constipated.

Finally, she huffed with more anger than a teen girl’s huff should be able to contain, and swung her fists downward into the shingles. One of them broke with a  _ crunch  _ that rang in his teeth.

Her knuckles came back bruised. The bruise was a blossoming flower, he decided internally, purple-blue and brown-black. He couldn’t remember if they’d already been that way when she’d come up, but it looked like it hurt.

“I fucking  _ hate you! _ ” she screamed in his face. Little droplets of spit landed on his cheeks. 

He would ask where that had come from, but he knew with how much pent-up anger each of them had, any little thing could fit them to burst. He’d started shaking helplessly once just because he’d lost his pencils and didn’t have anything to write with. 

After a while of angrily glaring at him, Summer turned away. He still hadn’t turned to face her.

In his peripheral vision, he saw, illuminated in the nighttime lights of the suburbs, something shiny down her cheeks. It was either sweat or tears. He wasn’t going to ask.

“Whatever. Have fun up here.”

The next thing he knew, she was gone.

* * *

ii.

He carved with a pocket knife into his closet wall-  _ one, two, three, one thousand seven hundred thirty six _ \- how many he could remember or count. He wasn’t sure what he’d do if they moved away, and he was forced to leave the chicken scratch pockmarks in the mustard yellow drywall.

The pocket knife Morty used was a special one- one his father had gotten him for his tenth birthday, back when there was a possibility he might turn out like a normal boy, with a love for sports and wrestling and toy soldiers. The handle was a shiny deep red, the color of ( _ blood _ ) velvet. He polished it every Sunday, knees tucked beneath him, a clockwork motion more constant than the sun’s orbit. 

And then, when every adventure with Rick had ended, he’d try and recall every red-splattered hulk of flesh he could remember counting, and he’d angrily carve it into the wall, knees still tucked beneath him. The first couple dozen marks were jagged, harsh, because he’d made them through tear-soaked eyes. But now it was a heavy rhythm, pulsing in his chest, just something he had to do because if he didn’t the world would stop turning.

Every adventure, every near-death experience, he found himself knelt at his almost-altar: a nameless graveyard in the middle of the suburbs, shakily burning the numbers into the wall so he would  _ know _ . He felt almost pretentious, to use words like those, but he used them anyway because that’s what it was. A body count, in simplest terms. In the ugliest, plainest words he could find to stick to whatever this ritual was. 

Morty might as well have been a walking corpse- Cotard’s delusion, said the Internet, but all he knew was that he was a dead man who had crawled out of his own grave. Because his body  _ was  _ back there, under the flower patch he had dug, as egocentric as that was. 

“One thousand seven hundred thirty six,” he had told his sister one night, when they were sat on her bed with all the lights on at two in the morning. They were scared of something they could not comprehend, there in her room, scared of the shadows in the corners. The blanket curled around them felt too tight.

She hadn’t asked what he’d meant.

* * *

iii.

“Why,” asked the school counselor, “did you attack that boy, Morty?”

He had plenty of answers for her-

( _ faggot hey retard hey idiot how’s it going fag i’ll kill you you fucking moron just wait until after school give me that fag book of yours Smith what you think you can stand up for yourself? _ )

-but he didn’t give her any of them.

Her eyes creased a little. He may have been an idiot, but he could read faces. She pitied him more than anything. He was the stupid kid, the one whose grandpa always pulled him out of school and the one whose parents were divorced and the one who had the alcoholic mom. It was all on his file, he was sure. The way she frowned told him she was disappointed, but not surprised. Irritated, but not outraged. This was not a shock to anyone.

He could’ve given her a reason. He could’ve told her about the little pockmarks in the drywall and how it felt to have a laser sear through the skin in your palm so that it came out the other end. He could’ve given her some sob story about vodka in the garage and Camel cigarettes under mattresses and red on the handle, red like pools of quivering blood.  

Instead, he shrugged. “I’unno.”

She looked at him, tired. “I need a better answer than that, Morty.”

“H-He’s a dick. That’s why.”

Her nostrils flared, the grip she had on her fuschia gel pen tightening and the creases in her lips deepening. 

He found his legs moving without his permission. He was standing, knocking the uncomfortable plastic blue chair back onto the floor. His head felt like angry static.

“Mr. Smith-”

His books were finding their way into his hands, heavy and certain, geometry, biology, english literature. Things he didn’t care about.

“You cannot just leave-”

And there was his backpack, heaved across his back. It was a steady weight. 

“Morty-!”

And then he was gone.


End file.
